The presidential race is still undecided. Due to the proliferation of mail-in voting strongly encouraged by the political class as a response to COVID-19 — and the time it will take for those ballots to be counted — the results of the election are not yet known. Someone has won the election, but it may be days or even weeks before the American people know who that someone is. Even worse, the unprecedented number of mail-in ballots raises serious concerns about extent of vote fraud and intimidation that may have occurred.
And it is not just the presidential race that is up in the air; the American people do not know for certain which party will control the House or the Senate
Echoes of 2000
This writer lived in Columbus, Ohio, during the 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. I went to bed very late, having stayed up hoping to know the results. The next morning, I had two copies of the Columbus Dispatch waiting on my doorstep. They were identical except for the front page story above the fold. One announced Bush as the winner; the other announced that Gore had won. In a close race, Florida was the deciding state and the results there were within 1,000 votes. There were issues with the paper ballots and a recount was called. It took weeks for the hanging chads, pregnant chads, recounts, and litigation to be settled and sorted and for Bush to be declared the winner. He won Florida by just over 500 votes.
The 2020 election will not likely hinge on one state, but on the uncertainty of how voters decided in several battleground states. Though results from those who voted in person show Donald Trump as the likely winner, those results could change dramatically over coming days as millions of mail-in ballots are counted from all over the nation. The only thing that is certain is that the 2020 election will make the 2000 election appear simple by comparison.
“The Most Important Election of Our Lives”
This writer has spent most of his adult life hearing that each election was “the most important election of our lives.” Listening to that for 20 years will lead one to become a bit jaded. It’s a little too much like the boy who cried wolf. But — and that is a big but — this time is not like those other times. The problem with the story of the boy who cried wolf is that the moral is only partly right. Sure, the boy is to blame for lying. But what about those adults in the village who — because they didn’t want to feel foolish again — refused to verify the boy’s claims. Don’t they share some of the blame?
Given the violence, destruction, and lawlessness of the Left, it is clear that this election is not like others. There really is a wolf this time. And the wolf would gladly steal this election — or burn America to the ground if he fails.
Never have Americans felt that so much was at stake. America is more divided than ever before. And with increased violence in the name of “protest” increasingly seen as normal, the next few weeks could be dangerous times. If Trump is eventually named the winner, it is to be expected that Leftists — from BLM to Antifa — will burn and pillage their way across the land, laying waste to a country they hate and failed to gain control over. If Biden is announced as the winner, those same Leftists will feel all the more emboldened to pick up the pace of the wanton destruction they have dished out in recent months; after all, they will feel that they have the imprimatur of the incoming administration.
The divide in America is real. Exit polls conducted by CNN show that those who think abortion should be legal voted for Biden while those who think it should be illegal voted for Trump; Biden voters overwhelmingly prefer containing coronavirus over rebuilding the economy; in the “most important issue to your vote” category, Biden voters chose racial inequality (91 percent), coronavirus (82 percent), and health care policy (63 percent) as their top choices while Trump voters chose the economy (82 percent) and crime and safety (71 percent). And Black Lives Matter enjoys a 78-percent favorable rating among Biden voters, while 85 percent of Trump voters chose “unfavorable.” That last poll result fits perfectly with another result showing that 83 percent of Biden voters think the American criminal-justice system treats black people unfairly, while 83 percent of Trump voters think it treats all people fairly.
The one poll result that really stands out is that while only 30 percent of those who voted for Trump said they were doing so to keep Biden from winning, a whopping 68 percent of Biden voters said they were voting against Trump. And — to further illustrate the width of the chasm separating the Left from the Right in America — on the question, “Who has the physical/mental health to serve effectively as president?” 98 percent of each group chose their candidate.
Let that sink in: 98 percent of Biden voters think the candidate who could not remember which office he was running for and who aimlessly rambled and slurred his way through interviews and campaign speeches all over the country has the mental health to be president, but the man who speaks off the cuff while rattling of detailed facts and figures doesn’t.
But then, these are the same people who shout from the rooftops that there is no such thing as voter fraud even as cries of “Putin’s Puppet” echo on the winds.
As to voter fraud, Trump spoke to the American people in the wee hours of Wednesday morning and demanded that all the votes in the presidential election be counted so what appears to be a re-election victory for him can be certified. And as LifeSiteNews reported, Trump promised to go to the Supreme Court if necessary to secure the vote and make sure states don’t “find any ballots at 4:00 in the morning.” He went on to say, “A very sad group of people are trying to disenfranchise the vote, and we’re not going to stand for it.”
Trump said he believes he won the election based on the leads he has in most of the remaining battleground states. He blasted the Democrat election officials in multiple Democrat-controlled states who stopped counting the votes.
“This is a fraud to the American public. This is a fraud on the nation. This is an embarrassment to our country. We won this election,” he said. “Frankly, we did win this election. We will be taking this to the US Supreme Court. We will win this, and as far as I’m concerned, we’ve already won it.”
And Democrats have pushed the rules of this election to the breaking point since before Election Day. One recent example is the tweet by Pennsylvania’s Democrat Attorney General Josh Shapiro. On October 31 — days before Election Day — Shapiro tweeted that Trump was trying to keep votes from being counted because if all the votes are counted, Trump would lose Pennsylvania.
The glaring impropriety of that tweet stretches the boundaries of credulity. With the election still in play at the time of Shapiro’s tweet, his message to Trump supporters was clear: Don’t bother to vote, you’re wasting your time. It appears that Shapiro was simply projecting his own fear, since as of this writing, Trump enjoys a favorable margin in Pennsylvania. With 77 percent of the ballots counted, Trump is ahead by ten points equaling more than 600,000 votes.
A Deadline to the Uncertainty
One major part of the uncertainty of this election is that many states allowed mail-in ballots to be postmarked by November 3 and be counted when they arrive. The states that will accept ballots after Election Day make up 317 of the nation’s 538 Electoral College votes — or 59 percent. As a result, Election Day 2020 is — in reality — Election Week. In Washington State, it is Election Month, since any ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and arrive by November 23 — nearly three weeks later — will be counted. And that does not take into account the backlog of counting those ballots. Since many states used the convenient excuse of COVID-19 to extend mail-in voting to all voters, that backlog could take days or weeks to clear. In fact, New Jersey and Oregon conducted the entire election by mail only.
The one thing working in favor of limiting the chaos of election uncertainty is that since the 2000 election fiasco, federal law requires states to present their results to the Electoral College six days before the Electoral College gathers in person. That date — known as the “safe harbor” deadline — falls on December 8 this year. So, worse case scenario, states will have about five weeks to sort out the results and report them to the Electoral College to be certified.
Of course, those five weeks could prove unnerving if Leftists use that time to enforce — by terror — what they hope to enforce by political power, should their candidate and his running mate prevail.
